Economy Archives - Page 16 of 18

Labor

Sick From Work

COVID-19 and the crisis of occupational safety and health in meatpacking

April 14, 2020 • by Paul Apostolidis

“The guy at the plant said they had to work to feed America.” That’s what The New York Times reported Willie Martin said about his mother, Annie Grant. She had been one of the latest of a growing number of meatpacking workers to contract the coronavirus: in her case, it ...

Capitalism

CARES Will Care for Wall Street and Big Business

For macroeconomic balance maybe not so much

April 13, 2020 • by Lance Taylor

Support from INET and help from Thomas Ferguson and Özlem Ömer are gratefully acknowledged. To recap from a previous post (Taylor, 2020): The recently approved $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security “stimulus” (or better, disaster relief) package amounts to ten percent of GDP. This amount is probably well less than the ...

CARES Will Care for Wall Street and Big Business

Capitalism

Time for a Rethink on the Worth of Work

Economists undervalue what we need most now: care workers

April 7, 2020 • by Paulo L. dos Santos

The pandemic poses new and unique economic challenges. It compromises our ability to engage in productive and commercial activities requiring close contact between groups of people—that includes most of the things sustaining a modern economy. Epidemiologists tell us this is needed for several months. Responding in a way that minimizes ...

Economy

The COVID-19 Crisis Demands Bold, Progressive Economic Ideas

A Call for Papers

April 2, 2020 • by Teresa Ghilarducci, Richard McGahey and Paulo L. dos Santos

This pandemic poses a series of unprecedented economic challenges. It compromises our ability to engage in productive and commercial activities that require close contact between groups of people. Because fighting the disease requires non-essential workers to stay at home, it threatens to trigger a catastrophic recession, if not depression, as entire ...

The COVID-19 Crisis Demands Bold, Progressive Economic Ideas

Labor

Will the US Pandemic Response Strengthen Workers?

Worker protections and collective bargaining must be part of any economic recovery plan

March 30, 2020 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

But this rare moment of bipartisanship will turn out to have been a missed opportunity if it does not also reverse the long decline of worker protections and collective-bargaining power in the United States. As Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard University and many others have shown, this trend has contributed significantly to the ...

Will the US Pandemic Response Strengthen Workers?

Capitalism

COVID-19 Hits the Dual Economy

Incomes Destroyed at the Bottom, Profits Supported at the Top

March 30, 2020 • by Lance Taylor

This note presents broad brush illustrations from a simple accounting model of the impacts of the coronavirus epidemic on macroeconomic balance, with emphasis on fiscal interventions. The premise is that supporting effective demand is essential for sustaining economic activity. The COVID-19 epidemic created mass unemployment by shutting activity down. The ...

Democracy

There’s No “Trade-Off” Between Saving Lives and Saving the Economy

A humane society doesn’t trade some lives for others

March 28, 2020 • by Peter Dreier

Nonsense. In February, when he had a chance to take decisive action to get ahead of the virus, Trump told his advisors not to “do or say anything that would further spook the markets.” Trump’s weeks of downplaying the crisis, and his failure to prepare for the looming pandemic, deepened the problem. But having finally acknowledged the ...

There’s No “Trade-Off” Between Saving Lives and Saving the Economy

Finance

Pandemics and Your Retirement Accounts

What You Should and Should Not Do

March 24, 2020 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

First, pause with gratitude if you have a retirement account. Only 41 percent of older workers have any type of retirement plan at work, whether it is a traditional pension or a 401(k) TIAA- type plan. The rate of non-coverage is even higher for younger workers. And the rate of ...

Europe & Central Asia

Labor Rights in the Time of Pandemic

Hungary’s return to the 19th Century in response to Covid 19

March 23, 2020 • by Laszlo Bruszt

This step is unprecedented in the post-second World War continental law that uses Labor Codes to provide guaranteed rights to employees. It also deviates from the more recent treatment of labor relations during the pandemic in the OECD countries. This move back to absolute ‘freedom of contract’ is reminiscent of ...

Economy

David Brooks & Economic Inequality

Consulting the “Great Books”

January 23, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

Yet in his column published in the New York Times on January 16, entitled “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy,” echoing similar pieces in the past, I had hoped that he would have consulted them for wisdom again. In it he argues that despite the rapid growth of economic inequality in the United States, ...

Finance

Sovereignty, Financial Power, and Central Banks

Why bad critiques of finance spur right wing populism

December 25, 2019 • by Joseph Vogl, Dennis Ohm and Jochen Schmon

With sentences like this, Joseph Vogl became one of the most rigorous German critics of the austerity politics enforced by the so-called Troika in the aftermath of the European Debt Crisis. In his latest work The Ascendancy of Finance (2017) he deals with the political power of central banks. In this interview, ...

Sovereignty, Financial Power, and Central Banks

Capitalism

Conflicting Claims

Race, Capitalism & the Current Crisis: Conundrums for Those Who Envisage a Socialist Future

October 22, 2019 • by Michael C. Dawson

The multiple capitalist crises the U.S. faces today are a result both of the inherent contradictions found within a capitalist social order, and from frictions and contradictions arising out of its articulation with two other systems of domination -- those of patriarchy and white supremacy. These crises have generated extreme ...